New commercial maritime radar systems require enormous test and certification before being rolled out. It is necessary to certify a radar system for its compliance with the existing requirements. Therefore, current certification procedures include extremely costly, several daylong open sea measurement campaigns. Unfortunately, not all requirements on the sea state are met compulsory during each measurement trail. Because of the long preparation time necessary, time-to-market values can be significantly increased if such a measurement campaign is missed. Nowadays, most of the requirements, like range accuracy and resolution can already be tested in a laboratory using radar target simulators. Others, like the detection of small targets in a sea clutter environment still have to be tested under real sea conditions on site. Disadvantageously, the weather conditions occurring throughout the campaign are neither controllable, nor reproducible.
In the U.S. Pat. No. 8,159,388 B2, a method for filtering sea clutter in a radar echo is described. Therein it is suggested to combine the modeling of sea clutter based on a hydrographic model with later filtering of actual sea clutter, wherein the hydrographic model that is used could describe precisely the evolution in time and scale of the sea surface.
Thus, there is a desire to simulate a well defined sea clutter scenario, since it would be a huge advantage in terms of cost and time during radar system development. It would significantly shorten the measurement campaign and it would also enable radar engineers to conveniently test their newly developed radar hardware and radar software with adaptable environment conditions in a laboratory environment with adaptable environment, such as different weather conditions.
Preferably, the adjustment of a radar detection threshold for detecting small targets in a commercial maritime radar system should be possible in a laboratory environment to avoid costly and time consuming sea measurement campaigns.